Gao Xingjian - Soul Mountain

On the way down the mountain you hear sobbing and going around the bend see a naked child sitting in the middle of the road. He is relentlessly sobbing and has become hoarse, evidently he is tired and has been crying for some time.

You walk up to the child and bend down to ask, “Are you all on your own?”

Seeing someone has come, he starts crying even more loudly. You grab his small shoulders, pull him to his feet, and pat off the dirt from his bare bottom.

“Where are the grown-ups of your family?”

The more you question him the more he cries, and there are no villages in sight.

“Where are your parents?”

He just shakes his head and looks at you, his eyes brimming with tears.

“Where do you live?”

Still whimpering, his little mouth pouts.

“Keep crying and I won’t take any notice of you!” you threaten.

This works and he instantly stops crying.

“Where are you from?”

He doesn’t speak.

“Are you all on your own?”

He just looks dumbly at you.

“Can you talk?” You put on an angry look.

He immediately starts crying again.

“Don’t cry!” You stop him.

He opens his little mouth, wanting to cry but not daring to.

“If you cry again I’ll smack your bottom!”

He somehow stops himself from crying and you pick him up.

“Little fellow, where do you want to go? Speak up!”

He clings instinctively to your neck.

“Surely you can talk?”

He looks dumbly at you, his face streaked with mud from his grubby hands rubbing at his tears. You are at a loss. He probably belongs to a peasant family nearby, his parents should look after him better. This is absurd.

You carry him for some distance but still see no sign of any houses. Your arms are numb and in any case you can’t keep going down the mountain with this mute child. You talk it over with him.

“How about getting down and walking for a while?”

He shakes his head and looks miserable.

You force yourself to walk on but still see no sign of any houses nor smoke from chimneys down in the valley. You wonder if he has been abandoned on the mountain road. You must take him back to where you found him, if no-one takes him his parents will come back for him.

“Little one, get down and walk a bit, my arms are numb.”

You pat his bottom and he actually falls asleep. He must have been left on the mountain road for a long time, the people who left him must be quite callous. You start cursing the parents who gave birth to him. If they can’t manage raising him why did they have him?!

You look at his little tear-stained face, he is fast asleep. He is so trusting, probably he has never been shown this amount of affection. The sun pierces through the thick clouds and shines onto his face. His eyebrows twitch and he moves, his face snuggling against your chest.

A gush of warmth wells up from deep in your heart and you realize you have not experienced such tenderness for a very long time. You discover that you are still fond of children and that you should have had a son a long time ago. As you look at him, you start to think he looks like you. While seeking pleasure did you by chance give him life? And then not care for him and abandon him? Did not even ever think about him? It is yourself that you are cursing!

You are afraid, afraid he will wake up, afraid he can talk, afraid he will understand. Luckily he is mute, luckily he is asleep and is not aware of his misfortune. While he is still asleep you must put him back on the mountain road and make a getaway before anyone discovers.

You return him to the mountain road where you found him. He rolls, huddles his little legs up to himself and puts his arms over his face. He must feel the cold of the ground and will soon wake up. You run off, in broad daylight, like a fugitive criminal. You seem to hear sobbing behind you, but don’t dare look back.

I pass through Shanghai. In the long queue at the ticket office I manage to get a ticket for the special express to Beijing which someone has returned and within an hour or so I am on the train — it’s a stroke of good luck. This huge metropolis with its teaming population of ten million people no longer interests me. The distant uncle I would have liked to have visited died even earlier than my father, neither of them was able to live to a venerable old age.

The black Wusong River which goes through the city gives off a perpetual stench. Fish and turtles are extinct but the inhabitants of the city somehow manage to survive. Even the treated tap water used for everyday consumption is brackish and worse still always smells of chlorine. It would seem that people are hardier than fish and prawns.

I have been to the mouth of the Yangtze. There, apart from the rustproof steel cargo ships floating on vast murky yellow waves, there are only reed-covered muddy shores which are washed by the same murky yellow waves. The silt in the water keeps building up and one day will turn the whole of the East China Sea into sandbars.

I recall that when I was a child the water of the Yangtze was always clear, both on fine and rainy days. Along the banks, from early morning to dusk fish vendors had fish that were the size of a child, and they sold them in sections. I have been to many ports along the Yangtze but there are no longer any fish that size and it’s even hard finding any fish stalls. It was only at Wanxian before the end of the Three Gorges, on the steps of the thirty- or forty-metre stone embankment, that I saw a few of them and the fish in the baskets were all a few inches long and in days gone by would only have been used as cat food. In those days, I used to like standing on the wharf on the Yangtze watching people on the pontoons casting their fishing reels. It was exciting when the fish emerged from the water, a real contest between fish and man. Today, there are more than ten thousand people working out strategies to clean up the river. After his superiors had left, an official from some section or department showing me around told me quietly that over one hundred species of the river’s freshwater fish were on the verge of extinction.

While the boat was moored for the night at Wanxian, the chief officer smoked and chatted with me on deck as we looked at the lights on the shore. He said that hiding in the cabin he had witnessed a terrible massacre in the period of armed conflicts during the Cultural Revolution and of course it was people and not fish that were killed. People were tied with wire at the wrists in groups of three and forced into the river by spraying them with machine gun fire: if one was hit all three fell. They were like fish on a hook, they splashed and struggled for a while, then floated down the river like dead dogs. Oddly, the more people are killed off the more people there are, whereas with fish the more that are caught the fewer there are. Wouldn’t it be better if it were the other way around?

However, people and fish do have something in common. Big fish and big people have all been done away with, clearly the world isn’t meant for them.

I think this distant uncle of mine was perhaps the last of the big people. I am not referring to big personalities. There’s an abundance of these any time as long as there are celebrations and banquets. By big people, I mean people I admire. This uncle I admire was given the wrong injection. He was in hospital being treated for pneumonia but two hours after an injection he was in the morgue. I’ve heard about people being killed in hospitals but I refuse to believe he died so wretchedly. It was during those chaotic years that I saw him for the last time. I was young and it was the first time he seriously discussed literature and politics with me. Before that he only joked and played with me. He had a deep voice and could sing l’Internationale in Esperanto. He was slightly asthmatic, a problem he had from when he was young; he said it was because he had smoked too many tobacco substitutes during the war. When he couldn’t get hold of tobacco, if he got the urge, he would smoke anything, from cabbage leaves to cotton leaves which he dried over a fire. People in such circumstances will always think of something.